As most of you who read my blog know, I make money blogging through PayPerPost. I heard a discussion on the “This Week in Tech” podcast recently that mentioned PPP and seemed to say that if a blogger has ever been paid for a blog post, then all product/service endorsements they make are suspect. That’s why I have always used a per-post disclosure on my site: if a post isn’t explicitly marked as being sponsored, then it hasn’t been sponsored, my opinion is my own, etc.

PayPerPost has added a new feature to their service: getting paid directly by individual advertisers. They call it PPP Direct. Instead of bloggers choosing which opportunities to take from a marketplace of advertisers, now advertisers can choose which blogger to have write about their product. This is something ReviewMe has been doing for a while, but it’s the first time PPP has gotten into this method of advertising. I haven’t had the chance to try it out for myself yet, my rate is set at $20 per post. If you’d like me to make a post about your website, product, service, or any other topic of your choosing, you can request a post from me through PPP Direct.

As you know, I occasionally write paid posts for the blog advertising service PayPerPost. I have made about $1,000 through these posts in the past six months or so. Not enough for it to be a real job, but a nice additional piece of money. With it I have bought a fancy-dancy video iPod and a plane ticket. Unfortunately, with my recently reduced PageRank that I mentioned earlier today, I haven’t been able to take many well-paying posts. None of the lesser-paying ones have been interesting - a lot of financial stuff - so I haven’t really been doing many of them either.

But PPP is offering a new feature that will undoubtedly bring their servers to a screeching halt once a week. They’ve announced $1K Tuesdays, where once a week between 12am and 12pm they are going to offer one opportunity worth $1000 that won’t be restricted by website rank, or to any specific topical blog, or any other way. (Those restrictions are known as segmentation in PPP-speak.) I’m not sure that I will ever be around to catch one of these $1000 posts, and they don’t say what they’re going to be about or what they’ll require bloggers to include in their post. Personally, I think they should restrict bloggers to only catching this opportunity once - that way everyone would have a turn.

But anyway, their servers will undoubtedly be straining a few hours from now. (I just realized - is that eastern time, pacific, UTC, or what?) They were smart to announce this on a Monday night because now every PPP blogger will be looking for this tomorrow!

This is a paid post for another “get paid to blog” service. This one is called SponsoredReviews.com and they have a slightly different model in that payments are not fixed by the advertisers. The advertiser gives a range of how much they are willing to pay, and bloggers “bid” on the opportunity by offering an amount somewhere within that range. For this particular post - which is sort of a meta-review since it’s about the service itself - the range was $5 to $50. Naturally I offered $50, and several days later I received a counteroffer of $20. The catch is that the site takes a large chunk off the top, and I’ll only get $13. Other services take a lot too, of course - that’s how they stay in business - but the way SponsoredReviews does it, it seems like I’m paying for it. Why not just say the offer is for $13 and I don’t lose anything, rather than saying the offer is $20 and I lose $7? In any case, the site seems geared more toward product and website reviews rather than buzz - or at least that’s how they’re presenting it. The actual opportunities seem to be more about generating links to the advertiser’s site rather than actual reviews. Anyway, my link on the site is here, so if you want me to review some product, website, or other thing you have, head over there and sign up.

The Burger King “Manthem” commercial is back on TV, almost identical to its spring 2006 version. And it’s time for me to add my voice to those of many other bloggers who have expressed their dislike for this ad spot.

Although I have been a vegetarian since 1993, my dislike for this ad has nothing to do with the Texas Double Whopper burger itself or the I Eat Meat slogan. Many people eat meat, that’s fine with me if that’s what they want to do. My dislike stems from the appropriation of Helen Reddy’s 1972 song I Am Woman, which was used as an anthem for the women’s liberation movement which was just taking flight around that time. And even though Reddy herself said that it was a “general empowerment song,” the fact is that it is specifically about the gender divide and Burger King has cruelly twisted the song’s history. How many young Americans are not familiar with that song? Do they think it’s a catchy jingle? How many think it’s a good perversion of a classic protest anthem? Would they be so willing to endorse a corporate-generated version of “We Shall Overcome” if it was written to sell hamburgers?

I know I said I wasn’t going to do any PayPerPost posts for a while, and that I was only going to write about things that interested me, but that last one was too good an opportunity pass up. How often do you get paid $25 for writing 100 words? Of course it doesn’t help that even though I am “taking a break” I’m still looking at the opportunity list. In fact I’m using InfoRSS to alert me to new opportunities as they are published - which is how I snagged the $25 post! As the number of Posties increases, opportunities are disappearing faster and faster, especially the high-paying ones. I feel lucky to have a PageRank of 6 so I can take the higher-targeted opportunities, which usually pay pretty well. (And if you saw the “hosting options” post in the RSS feed, just ignore that…I ended up not submitting it for payment after all.)

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here before, but the interpreter who had my position before I got here put herself on a ton of mailing lists. She was here for several years, and I guess she thought she was never going to leave, but there was a falling out between her and the woman who runs the contract for interpreters, so she was asked to go.

As a result, I am now on those mailing lists. More accurately, I am on a bunch of telemarketing lists - when my phone rings, there’s about a 90% chance it’s a telemarketer, because I never get calls here.

What I find really annoying, though, are the sleazeballs who pretend they know me. Or more accurately, they pretend they know the president of the company. They’ll say “oh hi, is Dave there?” or “can I talk to David?” But if these people knew the president and were really on a first name basis with him, they’d know…the president is deaf. No, you can’t speak to him. He uses video relay and anybody he interacts with in a corporate or B2B setting knows to call him through that. Buh-bye.

I’m impressed. The blog advertising company PayPerPost has acquired Performancing.com, an agency matching bloggers with advertisers. Most people probably have heard of Performancing because of their Firefox plugin, which is a blog editor that can post to WordPress, Movable Type, and Blogger. They also offer a free statistics service, which can be used on multiple blogs.

But Performancing mainly makes their money from advertising. They’re a perfect partner for PPP, because they have a strong network of blogs that place text advertising on their sites. I do mine through TLA (which owns PPP competitor ReviewMe), but it might be worth switching to Performancing. It might even be worth signing up for now just to see how they value my site. I’m really pleased to see PPP taking bold steps in marketing…it gives me hope that they will really stick around as a company and not fade into the nowhere land all the other startups have disappeared to.

There does seem to be a bit of concern from other Posties that Performancing is not going to open itself to smaller bloggers. That’s one thing I like about PayPerPost, as I’ve mentioned before - anybody can participate. The really big bloggers don’t need to work with PPP, they can just write about whatever they want and advertisers will pay to be on the site. But PPP allows the rest of us, the little folk, to make money from our blogs, too.

YouTube now has a special channel for PayPerPost. It primarily includes their reality show RockStartup, which is basically pretty self-referential from what I can tell…about how PPP is getting started as a fairly new company.

I quickly noticed a video about the HP camera giveaway, which I’ve displayed below. It’s one of the most accessible videos I’ve seen from PPP yet - the title tells you what we’re talking about, the name of the winner is shown in writing, and then the person who talks is almost easy to lipread. Of course, that’s partly because I know what she’s talking about - she says “PayPerPost dot com” several times, and she says “first winner,” and so forth. Considering that many PPP videos are not accessible to deaf viewers (or those who just don’t like sound on their computer), it’s a nice treat to see this one. And it looks like she’s holding the camera herself, so I get to compliment her on how steady she holds it!

I have to admit I’m a little disappointed in PayPerPost’s new affiliate program. Previously, when someone put down your e-mail address as they signed up for paid blogging, you were rewarded with $5. Under the new program, you get $15 - but people have to actually click your graphical link to get signed up. This means that instead of just remembering to put in your e-mail address, the person has to remember to come back to your site when they’re actually ready to sign up. If they look around, think about whether they want to join, and then come back later to actually join - but go straight to the PPP site - you’re not credited for their referral. (At least as I understand the program.)

Also, I really don’t like the big graphical links we’ve been given to do this with. One is an 88×31 button and the other is 145×100. I would prefer the option of a text link, and it would be nice to have an 80×15 button too, as those are pretty popular these days.

Then again, it may just be that the reason I’m grouchy about it is because I already referred sewcute under the old program, and I only got $5 for it!

I’m up to $232 with PayPerPost, and I’m slowing down a bit. A lot of the opportunities just aren’t interesting me at the moment, or they’re not paying as much as I’d want for what they’re asking, so I’m just not doing them. I’m also more conscious of how my paid posts look to my readers - thanks to input from a few of them, I’m being more choosy about what I write about because I want to have a reason to make the post.

I think I know what I am going to spend the money on (my first payment is in three days). Xmas gifts are an obvious option, but I’d rather pay for those out of my own pocket. Paying myself back for the $200 voice-nav GPS system is another option, but I’m not sure. Currently tops on the list is a “let the punishment fit the crime” scenario - I made the money by blogging, and I think I’ll use it for a related cost. I really want a custom design for my blog - I’m happy with the one I have for my personal site, since I’ve worked so hard on it, but I’m thinking of buying a custom design for CyDyBlog. I wanted to go with Moxie, because I’ve been a BlogMoxie fan for years, but it turns out they start at $2000! They kindly referred me to some other designers who will better fit my budget, and I’m inquiring around to see who will do semi-adult work.

By the way, I do want to address one issue relating to PayPerPost, and I’m not getting paid to say this. I think Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is making a real fool of himself regarding PPP. The $3 million in venture capital hit PPP right around the same time that ReviewMe launched, a competitor to PPP that just happens to be run by Text Link Ads - a major TechCrunch sponsor. Since then, Arrington has been vilifying PPP left and right. He’ll deny this all the way, but I think if ReviewMe were not owned by TLA, Arrington wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about PPP. Just my opinion, unpaid for. (By the way, I have nothing against TLA - they placed the ads I have in the sidebar. I’m just talking about Arrington here.)